E-books - books of the future

The statement of the headline might very well soon be true: as more and more parts of the average person’s life are being transferred in to the world-wide web, there’s no reason why books would be an exception. However, this doesn’t mean I personally support the idea. Don’t get me wrong, the internet is a decent source of information, especially if you need it fast, but people also need something in their lives that is concrete. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a paper-back book or the morning’s paper; it gives you the feeling of actually doing something instead of just watching other people act. You can’t put E-books in your bookshelf for other people to see what is important to you. After all, books can tell a lot about people and their lives.

Another thing that worries me about this E-book system is the possibility of books eventually suffering from the new publishing channel. They might be shortened because no-one wants to stare at a screen for hundreds of pages, or made easier to understand to lure in the bigger audiences. This is in my opinion what has happened to newspaper articles on the internet. The subject is almost never covered thoroughly, because people don’t have the patience to focus on anything for longer than the bare minimum. They want to be told the main points immediately and in a clear, compact way. This leads to everyone knowing what has happened, but no-one concentrating on why.

Some might reason their fondness of E-books by saying that everyone has access to them. In my opinion this is not true, since not nearly as many old as young people know how to use a regular computer, not to mention an IPad. Libraries, which are one of the best benefits our tax money offers us, would become unnecessary because there’s no such service provided on the internet. People might buy fewer books since what use is there in owning a file which will just be saved on a database among other meaningless stuff? Old-fashioned books which have actual pages have meaning, a soul in them. They not only tell a story but have one of their own as well. Books are a source of knowledge, entertainment and strong emotional experiences which make people’s lives better in a simple but significant way.       

A mother and her son

We Need to Talk About Kevin was released in the autumn of 2011 and is based on a book by Lionel Shriver. It tells the story of a troubled young boy who becomes a school shooter, but the relationship between Kevin and his mother is also a big theme. It hasn’t gained the huge international attention it in my opinion should have. This might be because most people only look for entertainment when watching a movie, and We Need to Talk About Kevin doesn’t offer that. It makes you uncomfortable, scared, hopeful, furious, sad, thoughtful, and many other things but leaves no-one cold. It’s not a movie you can watch, enjoy and forget the next day.

When I saw We Need to Talk About Kevin I was impressed by how well it matches Shriver’s book. Both the movie and the book start off a little slowly and it might be hard to follow the story at first, but if you just concentrate and get past the beginning you’ll be mesmerized and unable to stop watching or reading. The actors, especially Tilda Swinton as Kevin’s mother and Ezra Miller as Kevin himself, have done an amazing job. They haven’t been given that many lines, which means that a bulk of the acting and communication has to happen via gestures, expressions and body language. Miller is magnificent as the cold, indifferent and twisted teen-aged boy whose main goal in life seems to be making his mother’s life miserable. Swinton manages to impersonate the mix of confusion, disgust and unconditional love her character feels towards her son in a startlingly believable way. 

We Need to Talk About Kevin has many themes, the most obvious one being school shootings and the amount of pain they cause. I like that Shriver and the movie’s producers haven’t settled on filming one and a half hours of gory details of how the shooting itself happens but have tried their best to get to the bottom of why some people feel so desperate that they think the only way to ease their pain is to cause it to someone else. Kevin is not described as crazy or under the influence of violent computer games, but simply a victim of the modern world. He feels that nothing matters, it’s all so shallow and meaningless, and when nothing matters there aren’t that many restrictions limiting your actions.

One of the movie’s important themes is built around Kevin’s mother. She’s not the motherly type to begin with and even when Kevin is born she finds it difficult to love him like a mother is supposed to. In this kind of a situation, can you blame it on the mother? This seems far-fetched to me, since Kevin’s little sister grew up to be perfectly ordinary. Then again, if Kevin wasn’t getting any bad influences from around him, it would mean he was born a bad person, and I don’t feel comfortable believing this either.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of those movies that stays with you long after the credits have scrolled off the screen. It keeps you in its grip until the last shocking revelations, but still in the end doesn’t leave you completely lost and hopeless. It’s a timeless story of terror, guilt and regret, but ultimately of hope in humankind.    

My dream journey

If I could have a two-week all-expenses-paid holiday, I would go to Lapland. I’ve been there twice in the winter and I enjoyed it very much on both times. I’d probably go there with my family and preferably not during holiday season when it’s really crowded.

We would stay in a cottage, but one which could be compared to a normal house, including electricity. It would be located in a quiet place, near the lake, but there would also be a village near-by so that we wouldn’t be completely isolated. In the village, there’d be many different restaurants since I don’t enjoy cooking that much. The cottage should have a sauna, which could be in a separate building and there’d also be a chance to go ice swimming in the lake.

What comes to the activities, I’d mostly just like to relax, go walking in the woods with my dogs and eat good food. However, there are still a few things I’d like to try. Snow-shoeing would be great, especially if we could have a guide who would plan us a route which we’d then take. Another interesting experience would be to learn how to drive a dog sleigh, or, since we would have kilometers after kilometers of ice spreading in front of us, we might as well rent some snowmobiles. And what could be a better way to end a day spent outdoors than to go to a spa?   

Me - a bookworm?

I wasn’t one of those kids who already knew how to read, at least not properly, when they started school. But when I did learn how to read in the first grade, I guess I immediately liked it. I’ve also read books in English from an early age on since I used to be in an English class. Nowadays I think that I read English books at least a bit more than Finnish ones. This could be because I think that when a book is translated, something important is always lost, no matter how good the translation is.

For me reading a book is a way to spend my free time, maybe relax a bit. I don’t think that all books should have a meaningful message for the reader; sometimes a book can just be entertaining. Most of the books I read are of the romantic comedy- or thriller-type, but I’ve read a few which have been really touching and made me think.

Some people seem to think that if you start a book, you should also finish it. My opinion is that it’s a waste of time to read a book you don’t like. The books I’ve left to gather dust on the shelf have been either boring or too hard to understand. I don’t like it if I have to read a sentence multiple times before I get it, it takes all the fun away.

The best books I have read have been John Grogan’s Marley & Me and Cecelia Ahern’s PS. I Love You. Marley & Me is also great on film, but in PS. I Love You the actors who don’t remind the characters of the book at all ruin the whole movie. I definitely think that you should read the book first because then you will get so much more out of the film.